Related papers: Automatic Detection of Speculative Execution Combi…

New speculation-based attacks that affect large numbers of modern systems are disclosed regularly. Currently, CPU vendors regularly fall back to heavy-handed mitigations like using barriers or enforcing strict programming guidelines…

Spectre intrusions exploit speculative execution design vulnerabilities in modern processors. The attacks violate the principles of isolation in programs to gain unauthorized private user information. Current state-of-the-art detection…

CPU cache is a limited but crucial storage component in modern processors, whereas the cache timing side-channel may inadvertently leak information through the physically measurable timing variance. Speculative execution, an essential…

We propose ProSpeCT, a generic formal processor model providing provably secure speculation for the constant-time policy. For constant-time programs under a non-speculative semantics, ProSpeCT guarantees that speculative and out-of-order…

Speculative execution is an optimization technique that has been part of CPUs for over a decade. It predicts the outcome and target of branch instructions to avoid stalling the execution pipeline. However, until recently, the security…

Spectre and Meltdown attacks and their variants exploit hardware performance optimization features to cause security breaches. Secret information is accessed and leaked through covert or side channels. New attack variants keep appearing and…

Transient execution attacks, also called speculative execution attacks, have drawn much interest as they exploit the transient execution of instructions, e.g., during branch prediction, to leak data. Transient execution is fundamental to…

Speculative execution techniques have been a cornerstone of modern processors to improve instruction-level parallelism. However, recent studies showed that this kind of techniques could be exploited by attackers to leak secret data via…

Spectre vulnerabilities violate our fundamental assumptions about architectural abstractions, allowing attackers to steal sensitive data despite previously state-of-the-art countermeasures. To defend against Spectre, developers of…

Speculative side-channel attacks access sensitive data and use transmitters to leak the data during wrong-path execution. Various defenses have been proposed to prevent such information leakage. However, not all speculatively executed…

SPEculative Execution side Channel Hardware (SPEECH) Vulnerabilities have enabled the notorious Meltdown, Spectre, and L1 terminal fault (L1TF) attacks. While a number of studies have reported different variants of SPEECH vulnerabilities,…

The recent Spectre attacks has demonstrated the fundamental insecurity of current computer microarchitecture. The attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract arbitrary information about the memory contents…

Speculative execution attacks leverage the speculative and out-of-order execution features in modern computer processors to access secret data or execute code that should not be executed. Secret information can then be leaked through a…

The recent Spectre attacks have demonstrated that modern microarchitectural optimizations can make software insecure. These attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract information about the memory contents…

We propose a novel speculative decoding method tailored for multi-sample reasoning scenarios, such as self-consistency and Best-of-N sampling. Our method exploits the intrinsic consensus of parallel generation paths to synthesize…

The Spectre vulnerability in modern processors has been widely reported. The key insight in this vulnerability is that speculative execution in processors can be misused to access the secrets. Subsequently, even though the speculatively…

Modern out-of-order processors face speculative execution attacks. Despite various proposed software and hardware mitigations to prevent such attacks, new attacks keep arising from unknown vulnerabilities. Thus, a formal and rigorous…

Speculative decoding has emerged as an effective approach for accelerating autoregressive inference by parallelizing token generation through a draft-then-verify paradigm. However, existing methods rely on static drafting lengths and rigid…

Spectre attacks and their many subsequent variants are a new vulnerability class affecting modern CPUs. The attacks rely on the ability to misguide speculative execution, generally by exploiting the branch prediction structures, to execute…

Deployed large language models (LLMs) often rely on speculative decoding, a technique that generates and verifies multiple candidate tokens in parallel, to improve throughput and latency. In this work, we reveal a new side-channel whereby…